Comments on whole hexagrams, individual lines and so on
The second chapter of David Pankenier’s lovely book, Astrology and Cosmology in Early China – Conforming Earth to Heaven – rejoices in the title, ‘Watching for dragons.’ In it he talks in detail about the dragon of Hexagram 1, and also proposes a whole new idea about why the dragons are fighting in 2.6.… Read more »Why dragons fight in hexagram 2
The fourth kind of Yijing story I mentioned when I first called it a ‘Book of Stories’ was the huge narrative arcs of the Sequence – ‘you are here’ on the grand scale. Which is an easy bullet-point to write, but not so easy to expand on. Also, I’m no longer… Read more »Book of (very big) stories
The Image of Hexagram 3, Sprouting, says, ‘Clouds, thunder, Sprouting. A noble one weaves warp and weft.’ or as Bradford Hatcher translates, ‘sorts warp from weft’. What the noble one does is just two characters: jinglun, 經綸. Jing is the same word as in Yijing and literally means the warp threads on a loom,… Read more »A string sort of thing: hexagrams 3 and 40
…disguised as an archaeological discovery about Chinese pre-history. You might have seen the reports: someone has found clear evidence of a great flood in China. Here’s a good account of the discovery with a link to the full paper: in a nutshell, there was a great earthquake in about 1920BC which caused… Read more »Hexagram 43 is in the news…
A few posts ago, I tried to list all Yi’s ways of telling stories:
So I’ve written about the vignettes and the mythical allusions, and now we come to individual steps through the Sequence.
También disponible en español Hexagram 23 is called Stripping Away. The old character shows a knife, and a less-clear component that might be a well winch or a bag for filtering wine, separating the wine from the dregs. As LiSe shows, that blends into the meaning of the whole. But the knife component… Read more »Could Stripping Away be painless?
Hexagrams 9 and 26 are ‘Small Taming’ and ‘Great Taming’ – the same activity on a different scale. That activity is xu, 畜: rearing livestock, and farming in general. (Stephen Field actually translates these two hexagrams as ‘Lesser Stock’ – mostly goats – and ‘Greater Stock’, namely the horses, cattle and pigs… Read more »Hexagram 26: Great Taming
